


Home

by Bladespeaker



Category: Guild Wars 2
Genre: And angst, Gen, Guild Wars 2 Traveling Circus, Post-arc 1 of Traveling Circus, and Hope, and tiredness, hello have some homey goodness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-09
Updated: 2019-08-09
Packaged: 2020-08-13 10:16:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20172595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bladespeaker/pseuds/Bladespeaker
Summary: [DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVE NOT FINISHED ARC 1 OF TRAVELING CIRCUS.] Myrie visits her mother and father in Divinity's Reach.





	Home

Her home wasn’t anything magnificent. According to her mother, it hadn’t been since she was a toddler. It was only before it had sunk into the hole that was once the Canthan district that Myrie Ward’s home could have been called something worthy of the title that her mad father now held only on paper. 

It had been good then, her mother would tell her. It could have been worse, she would say with a sad smile towards the corner, where sunlight fell on the lined face of her father, heedless of the world outside his mind’s battles. 

Before she had her billet bought and was pressed into the service of the Knights of Gryphon, Myrie’s home had been much worse. She had grown up here, had stayed in the squat house long enough to realize the hand of her benefactor, her mentor, Gryphon Radwing, in its restoration. The walls that once bowed outward beneath the heavy weight of the cracked stone-tile roof straightened with the new braces he had helped install; the window where her father would sit in the sunlit corner no longer let pass the winter breezes during the times where the sun retired in the eastern lands. The roof no longer leaked during storms, and the floor didn’t have the squeaky spot by the divided dining and bedrooms that she would avoid when she first was learning how to steal.

Myrie Ward’s home had undergone many changes, she realized as she sat on the stool by her mother’s oven in the cramped kitchen. Gryphon had offered to help pay for a renovation, her mother explained, but it didn’t feel right, not when their neighbors’ houses were still struggling to keep themselves upright or not whistle in the stronger breezes. The human thief squatted on the rough wood and accepted the cup of warmed rice wine that her mother’s hands, once dressed with beautiful rings and stones, pressed into her own. They were beautiful still, Myrie thought, even unadorned. She drank the warm flame and listened to the tales her mother told and would tell for a thousand times more every time she returned home.

“He’s getting better,” Lady Ward said with a smile. “Gryphon says he spoke for a full thirty minutes when he last visited.”

“What did he say?” Myrie set the chipped porcelain cup back on its warmer by the cloth-wrapped bottle. 

“He wondered where you were.” The woman’s eyes brimmed with tears – proud, loving, mourning. “He wondered… how Quinn is.”

Her heart still aches at his loss, at the friend that could have been a lover. At the one who had turned from a scoundrel to a hero, paying for his honor in blood. Myrie hadn’t realized she was playing with his engagement ring on its silver chain until she heard his name. “And what did you say?”

“I’ve told Lemuel that he is away, Myrie.” Her voice was always soft, gentle as the hand she placed on her daughter’s world-weary shoulders. “That he will be away for a long time.”

The subject usually would change after Quinn’s death. Myrie still could feel her throat tighten at its mention, feel the tears prickling at the corners of her emerald eyes, the old questions and regrets stirring like ghosts in the house of her heart. Here, she let herself break. At home, she didn’t hide the scrapes, the bruises, the scars. 

“I’ll make us something again, Mom,” she would say at every threshold. “I could care less for the Crown. For Divinity’s Reach. When I fight the dragons,” she said, and her smile was proud, “I do it for you and Dad.”

“Oh, Myrie. My little treasure.” Her mother wrapped her arms around her daughter, still tall enough to rest her face in her hair. Myrie could hear the teasing smile in her voice as she had at every past farewell. “And little you will always be,” she sang playfully.

“Mom,” Myrie groaned. “Let me go; I’m not a kid anymore.”

“Let me tell you something, Miss Myrie Ward,” she replied, and her warm eyes were serious. “No matter how old you are, or how far you travel, you will always be my child. My ‘kid.’“ She pressed a kiss to her daughter’s dark brown hair. “Now, go. Keep saving the world. We’ll be here.”

“I’ll come home soon, Mom,” she would say. 

They all knew that she meant it.


End file.
